Category: publishing

first thoughts on marketing my new duology

I still seem to have trouble writing books which are easy (for me) to describe. “What are your new books about?” If I could have expressed what I wanted to express in a few words, or a few hundred words, I probably wouldn’t have written 130k+ words to express it. I think writing a book which is easy to describe must be something a writer or author must set out to do before beginning; know before creating the book what the easy description is, then make sure you write a book which fits it. Alas, that is not how I write books.

I did manage to do a lot of things with my latest books to make them more commercially viable than a lot of my other books, though pre-blurbing them was not one. For example, when structuring the story, I made sure that the “kindle preview” (or first couple podcast episodes) was more of a “hook” than I normally do. In one of the books, I took an exciting sequence from the end of the story and moved it to the beginning, so the book starts (almost misleadingly) with tension, drama, and action, instead of just exposition. In both books, I crafted the first sentence, the first paragraph, and the first 2 chapters specifically as “hooks”. I’ve also been working on creating industry-standard book covers for the books, which tell you very little about what the book is, while looking like a lot of the other book covers out there, and maybe make you want to click through and get to those first paragraphs/chapters. (I’ll show you the covers in a moment.)

The blurb/descriptions, though, are my next big challenge, along with coming up with commercially viable main titles for each book. (I have a series title / subtitle for both books: Never Let the Right One Go, which I had before I even knew it would be two books. That title is almost the inspiration for the whole project, actually.) The titles need to be short and declarative or active, preferably one or two words, and memorable. The blurbs can be up to about 100 words, but as I keep saying, I’m not much good at that part. And the title is 50-100 times harder. I’m not sure what I’ll do.

Anyway, the following are the quick-and-dirty first-draft covers I put on the first-draft eBooks I sent out to my First Readers this weekend. Keep in mind, I’m just using the name of each book’s protagonist as the titles for this version, “Sophia” and “Emily”, so the books can be told apart in my First Readers’ descriptions/responses. Also, I’m not 100% satisfied with the font. But this is the sort of generic/commercial covers I’ve come up with, so far:

 

The image of “Emily” is adapted from a photograph by Danila Panfilov, and the image of “Sophia” is adapted from a photograph by Jesse Millan. I think they’re great photos, and represent the characters well enough, and while the versions I used here were available under a CC BY license, so I can (theoretically) use them commercially as long as I credit the photographers, I’m thinking I need to contact the photographers, and may have to pay considerable sums of money (which I don’t have, and the books probably won’t earn) to get high-resolution copies of the originals for a print edition, to get broader license to actually distribute the modified images (the covers) as covers (I can credit them inside the book, but what about every online bookseller the cover appears on? Do I need to add their photo credit to the blurb to satisfy the CC license?), or to get model releases for using these two young ladies’ likenesses on my books. My business model of selling the original artwork I create for a book’s cover in order to cover the costs of creating the print edition doesn’t work when, instead of painting the cover, I have to buy photographs; it reverses it, turning the cover from a source of income to an expense. Not sure how to reconcile that, yet.

So that’s where I’m at. The books are written, and now I’m into getting them ready for marketing/distribution. As I get feedback from my First Readers (let me know if you’d like to be a Beta Reader!), I’ll modify the text, but in the meantime I’m trying to figure out these frustrating, commercial, details.

The possibilities of focus

I’ve been so scatterbrained, lately. Depressed, for sure, which has led to months without significant work, but which has also led to this recent paucity of focus. I spent most of 2011 reading, researching, and planning toward writing my vampire duology, with the intention of being able to write both books rather quickly – possibly within November, for NaNoWriMo. I wrote roughly half of the two books (most of one, and part of the other) in November, and have eked out another 6 chapters or so for them since then, but I still have about 20 chapters remaining to write.

There’s so much work yet to be done on these books. Beyond the 60+ good hours of writing it will take to finish the first drafts, there’s initial editing so I can send to my Beta Readers, then days or weeks waiting for them to get back to me with their feedback, then re-writes and edits based on that feedback and possibly (if I can convince anyone to re-read the books so quickly) a second round of the same. Once I’ve got the basic text in good shape I’ve got to do another close read (copyediting) before I begin recording the audio version – a step which always finds new errors and awkward sentences/dialogue in the text, and which I prefer to do before publishing, when possible. I’ve got to do the interior layout, which shouldn’t be too difficult at this point and with all the experience I have, but I’ve also got to design the cover in three ways, for each individual eBook as well as for the paper/limited-edition/flipbook, hopefully all as a single image. I’ve got to do fundraising (possibly via Kickstarter) to pay for the paper edition, which almost certainly takes weeks or more. Actually podcasting the audio version may take up to a year, though it’s the hundreds of hours of recording, editing, and assembling them which I’ll want to have done before publication. After all that, getting the eBooks ready will be a snap.

Why am I thinking about all this? I just noticed January has slipped away, almost without my notice, and February is at hand. Tomorrow I’ll process the data on January eBook sales and (possibly) update the prices on some of my books/eBooks, according to the formula I rolled out at the start of the year. This has reminded me that Phoenix Comicon is coming up at the end of May; hopefully the significantly lower prices this model affords my paperbacks will result in increased sales at Comicon. This has led me inexorably to the idea that, if possible, I’d like to have my vampire duology flipbook on hand and for sale at the Phoenix Comicon. Which led to thinking about everything in that last paragraph, and more.

Part of the ‘more’ is all the other projects I’ve been working on lately, in my lack of focus, especially the interactive book on writing and publishing. I mentioned on Google+ last night that, in addition to beginning to write that book, I spent some time mapping out its (quite complex) hypertext structure; it’s intended to be read in a non-linear way, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book as well as a cross between a memoir and a how-to guide for independent writing and publishing, and it’s been percolating up through my mind for years. At the current stage of mapping and note-making, I’ve already got forty-plus chapters/chunks started; if no more occur to me, and they’re each the 1500+word chunks they’ve been becoming so far, it’s already shaping up to be book-length, complex, and interesting. I’ve got at least another 60 hours of work just writing the thing, and possibly over 100 hours, the way it’s been going.

(I won’t even mention each of the other projects I’ve had queueing up and being worked on by my scattered thoughts and efforts, except to say that if I continue on as I am, none of them -certainly not the vampire books- will be finished by Comicon.)

According to my calculations, if I seriously applied myself, I could finish the first draft of the vampire duology in six or eight solid days of work, since I’ve already got it all well-planned and developed. The same is roughly true of the book on publishing; six to ten long, hard days of dedicated work and I could have a first draft complete, from where I’ve already got it. The work would be intense, draining work, and would require me to (somehow) overcome the worst elements of my own insanity; what I have been trying to figure out is whether, if I actually applied myself and accomplished those things, would I have the time needed to get either (or preferably both) projects ready for sale in time for Phoenix Comicon. All that extra work I listed off in the second paragraph – can it be completed and the finished books delivered to my hands before the end of May? And if so, is it worth it to me to try to do so?

If I set myself to these tasks/goals, to this deadline, the aspect most at risk for being potentially short-changed is the editing/rewrites. Getting people, even family and close friends, to read a single book and give feedback (even just basic spelling & grammar, to say nothing of content) in as little as a week or two tends to be a huge fight and to carry a significant attrition rate. I dread sending out two (or worse, three) books with the intention of getting meaningful feedback on any limited timeline, for free. I don’t know how long professional editors would take to do the work, but I know I can’t afford such a thing right now. There are some other parts of the work I can accomplish while waiting for feedback, such as cover design, or working on the other title, but if I expect to incorporate any meaningful changes to the text, the bigger time-sink of recording the audiobook has to wait. I can probably start fundraising before completing the final edits of the text, which helps even out the timeline, some.

Let’s see what the hard deadline would be… Phoenix Comicon runs May 24-27 (Memorial Day Weekend, except without the Memorial Day), which means I’d want to have any items for sale there on hand no later than Tuesday the 22nd, for booth setup Wednesday. LSI typically takes about a week from when I send them the files before they approve a title for printing, then another 3-5 days to print, then I have them shipped via UPS Ground (because shipping heavy things like cases of books any faster is prohibitively expensive), so to be conservative I need to submit the files three weeks before I need the books on hand, at the latest. That means I have to have the book ready for print on or before May 1st.

Yow. 90 days.

If I go mad (in a good, hard-working way) for the next couple/few weeks, I can finish at least the vampire books by the end of next week, and possibly all three books the week after that, and get them to my Beta Readers before mid-February. I’ll need not less than a week after I think I’m done editing the book to work through the audio version, probably at least two weeks, plus time to make final changes to the layouts & text after that, so I should say I need to be done polishing the text by mid-April. That doesn’t sound so bad.

Of course, if I continue to have trouble focusing, trouble writing for long periods, or writing at reasonable rates, even with significant daily work it could take me until mid-March to finish the first drafts. Ugh.

What if I need significant re-writes? These books are important to me. Important that they express what I want them to express, even to casual readers. Not so important that they read like mainstream fiction… they’re not even in the same realm as that. But important to me that they’re good, that they do what they set out to do. Tell the stories they were meant to tell. I don’t know. I don’t really even know how to do re-writes. (Ooh; I’ve just added another chapter/chunk’s beginning to the book on writing/publishing, about my editing/rewriting process, or lack thereof.) If my Beta Readers all come back to me saying something like “we don’t really believe Emily is in love with Nicholas; you have to show it, make us feel it, it isn’t there”, or “we couldn’t buy in to anything Nicholas and his group were doing; it was obvious you disagreed with everything he had to say or tried to do”, I may just have a total breakdown, as that would mean most everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish (in one of the books) I had failed at, compromising the work straight to the core. I might have to take another year on the re-writes, or I might just publish as-is, with the admission that I’m a shitty writer… I don’t know where my emotional collapse would leave me, after excellent feedback like that. (Although, really, I’m just kidding myself with ideas like that; I have never in my life received feedback of that caliber. I don’t know whether it’s because the people reading my books understand my intent and I’m actually doing what I meant to do, or whether my goals were so far beyond the beyond that no one even know what was wrong, and that I’ve secretly, quietly, been a dismal failure all these years. (On the other hand, based on the comments in the worst of my reviews, the one and two star reviews, the single-sentence reviews, the reviews from people who admit they quit reading in under 50 pages… the things those people hate about them are generally all the things that were so important to me to accomplish, or were at least intentional. Not failures of writing, but failure of readers to appreciate what the author was setting out to do. The polarizing effect of my work has become quite encouraging, lately.)) I feel like time is my enemy, at times.

Still, even with worst-case responses, if I can get any meaningful feedback out of people within a month of sending them my books, even that should give me enough time to accomplish significant rewrites, if necessary. Whole chapters, or plot-lines, could be replaced in the time remaining… So I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do. Start applying myself. Intensely. Finish three books’ first drafts in the next three weeks, and have them ready for publication within the next three months.

I’d be tempted to find some money in the budget to order a bunch of modafinil, but I suspect that, if all goes to plan, I’ll be done (or very nearly done) with the most intense part of the work before the drugs arrived from my international pharmacy. If I didn’t have an unnatural aversion to 1) seeing doctors and 2) dishonesty, I’d be much better off convincing a local doctor to write me a prescription for the stuff, and picking it up at my local pharmacy the same day. Somehow, violating federal and international laws bothers me less than either of the things involved in obtaining modafinil the way I’m supposed to. Oh, well. If I had modafinil on hand, I wouldn’t have even had to question any of this, as getting this level of work done would become nearly trivial. *sigh*

I’d better go get to work.

Crumbs left over from: Numbers, 2011

While preparing to write my big, long post with all the numbers from 2011 (and Q4/2011), I took the following screen grabs from Smashwords and iTunesConnect, showing a snapshot of my sales through various sales channels:

Apple eBook sales 2011
Smashwords eBook sales 2011

As you can see, the numbers are as small as I’ve been telling you. This isn’t the whole picture; there’s also a few dozen kindle sales, a few direct BN sales, my half-dozen direct Smashwords sales, et cetera, but I really liked that iTunes chart showing I usually only sell  two or three eBooks a month through Apple. Then the Smashwords summary of the year was also a bit dismal, so I captured it, too.

Then I totally forgot to include them in my big numbers post. So here they are.

my web-based eBooks, and whether to leave them there

You may not be aware of it, but last year I created web-based versions of … looks like seven of my eBooks. It was a significant amount of work to get them set up, because of the way I wanted to do it – I used a wordpress modification which allows readers to comment on every single paragraph individually, and to divide the text into reasonably small “bites” of content. So for books like Cheating, Death I could break it up by chapters (most are almost exactly 2,500 words – long for a web page, but not totally unreasonable (e.g.: putting a whole novel on one long, scrolling page)), but you can go in and comment on any individual chapter of the book if you wanted. (Say, if there were a typo, or a plot hole, or other problem. Or if there was a particular scene you liked or didn’t like, and wanted to say so.) I like the idea of it, and while I’m not generally a fan of what commenting tends to be on most sites, I’ve seen this sort of setup put to excellent use and I can imagine a lot of good things coming from it.

On the other hand, it’s ridiculously difficult to try to track how many people are reading such a thing. I’ve tried fixing it several times, but Google Analytics doesn’t report it properly. I’ve been downloading my server access logs and manually parsing them (to get eBook download numbers) since February of 2011, when 1 and 1 (my web host) changed their Web Statistics to “Site Analytics” and removed all the usefulness from the tool for me. I tried parsing out the data about access to the 7 domains/subdomains which hold the web-based versions of these novels, to try to get any useful data about how many people have been reading them, and to start I just parsed out February and December’s numbers (rather than going through the full year before figuring out whether I can get anything useful out of them). (Yes, I know, I could maybe write a script/program to parse the logs for me. That might even work for the eBooks, despite at least half of the logs being garbage (it looks to me like zombies accessing hundreds/thousands of nonexistent URLs, possibly as some wasted DDOS effort), but for these sites … I’ll explain.) The logs are a mess.

I’d have to figure out which IPs are robots, first, I think, so I can get rid of all the requests from them – a lot, lot, lot of the requests are clearly spiders following every single link on every single page. Since every single paragraph has a unique URI for its location and a corresponding link to the separate comments associated with it, there are hundreds/thousands of links per book which I know no human would ever have clicked; they’re links to comments which clearly say there are zero comments. From what I can tell, there’s at least one Russian spider/bot following every link of every page of all these domains at least once a month, using a wide range of IP addresses to do so. Plus google, which isn’t as thorough or as frequent – which seems reasonable, since none of these sites have been updated in the slightest in a year.

ASIDE: Oh, yeah, that’s another thing. There hasn’t been a single comment anywhere on any of the books in a year. (Well, come to think of it, those Russian IPs are probably the SPAM bots posting SPAM comments Akismet has no trouble automatically moderating. There are huge numbers of those.) Whether or not anyone is reading these versions of the books, they certainly aren’t commenting on them. Or linking to them (no trackbacks), or emailing me / calling me / texting me about them. (Aside to the aside: While I was in the middle of writing this post, I received a phone call from someone asking whether I buy poetry. The person says they have, maybe, six or seven poems. Apparently, ever. It’s like people can’t read.)

So I can pretty easily see how much traffic a particular domain/subdomain received, based on the logs. A lot of that is bots, not humans. Worse, the bots make it so, if I try to total up access to individual pages of each book, I’ll have to manually filter out all the requests the bots made for things humans didn’t. There’s no easy script for that, because I have to make a human determination about which pages humans might have clicked on and which ones they clearly didn’t (or aren’t worth counting), and there are hundreds to thousands of those little decisions per domain per month of data. Some of it isn’t just bots, but bot-garbage (requests for non-existent pages). I thought I’d take a look at the 1 and 1 Site Analytics to see what it said, and at the way, way lower Google Analytics numbers to compare, but … they’re all so wildly different from one another. For reference, the 1 and 1 official Site Analytics tool reports fewer than 1/4 of the requests for my most popular eBook file (not the web ones, the PDF) versus the raw logs those analytics are theoretically built from, and for other files I’ve already parsed, even the variations are all over the board. Likewise, if the 1 and 1 Site Analytics tool were to be believed, in December 2011 around a thousand different people each read one chapter of the web version of Cheating, Death (pretty evenly distributed across all 13 chapters), and a small handful read every chapter. My access logs show almost 2k page requests (almost double what 1 and 1 shows) for the same period. Google shows … twenty page requests from 11 visitors… though admittedly, they’ve mixed together numbers from four other books in that (all the books in the Lost and Not Found universe are on the lostandnotfound.com domain, and I can’t get Google Analytics to properly separate out the subdomains) so that’s 20 page requests across the several hundred pages of five books… and only really from 9 different pages, only 1 from Cheating, Death… except it isn’t that, either. Google has no idea what to do with these web pages.

So how many people are actually reading these versions? While I don’t want to actually invest the dozens of hours it would take to parse the data, at a glance it looks like very few. Possibly none, depending on the bots. Maybe a dozen people a month. Why am I asking? Because I have to pay the domain renewal fees on those domains every year, really. Is it worth $9/year (and/or the hassle of moving them to modernevil.com, or moving the registrations to another registrar, or whatever) for zero to perhaps a dozen people a month to read these versions of these books, instead of the other sixteen ways they can read them (seven free)? This year I’m cutting out recurring costs for things which my readers don’t take enough advantage of for them to be financially worthwhile (see my posts on canceling distribution, if you haven’t yet), and I’ve got a few months but I’ve got to decide whether or not to keep paying to maintain the dragonstruth.com and lostandnotfound.com domains… and whether, if/when I release the domains, I should bother getting the web-based versions of the books back up and running on one of the domains I’m keeping.

Speaking of which, what do you think about my moving this blog to, say, teelmcclanahan.com/blog/ ? That site probably needs a revamp, anyway, but if I’m paring down domains, maybe lessthanthis.com is one to subtract, too. Considering I never/extremely-rarely get comments, I’ll probably turn off blog comments while I’m at it. I ask these sorts of open-ended questions, questions only readers of the blog can answer, and don’t get answers… maybe I’d do better about not bothering to ask (or feeling compelled to ask) if comments were just … gone.

eBooks versus audiobooks, looking at my latest numbers

eBooks are on the ascent, serialized audiobooks are declining. At least for me and my books, they are. All the books I make available in one format, I’ve also made available in the other (except for poetry, so far), so comparing them seems pretty reasonable to me. There are a few discrepancies, for example Cheating, Death, which I made available for free as a serialized audiobook almost immediately, but kept the eBook for sale only for over a year, and which made very few eBook downloads (and a lot of audiobook downloads) during that period. Things like the Untrue Tales series give my numbers hiccups, because of the various versions which have been available over time, and ongoing differences between eBook and audio versions, not to mention that each successive book after Book Two gets fewer downloads. If you didn’t see my latest post with numbers for 2011, you may want to go take a look before reading this post. At least to realize, yes, all my analysis is based on real numbers, and lots of them.

For all my titles, every single one that was available in both formats, in 2011 the free eBooks were downloaded more frequently than the free Podiobooks. For every book other than Cheating, Death, the ratio of eBook to audio is not less than about 2 to 1, though the Dragons’ Truth eBook was downloaded almost 6 times more than the audiobook. If I just look at Q4 of 2011, the numbers are even more significantly disparate; even the Cheating, Death eBook was downloaded 4 times more than the Podiobook, and Dragons’ Truth was around 14 to 1. (Most titles were at 5 to 1 for Q4, though my least popular Podiobooks (short stories & director’s cuts) were at 6 or 9 to 1.) Looking at Q1, Q2, and Q3, I find that Cheating Death had twice as many audio downloads as eBook downloads, and that the Untrue Tales books were pretty closely matched, but that the rest of my titles were 2, 3, or 4 to 1 being downloaded as eBooks instead of as audiobooks.

In 2008, all the books I had available for free in both formats (and most of them in 2009) had more downloads as Podiobooks than eBooks. Consequently, I spent a lot more time and effort working on the audiobooks side of my production efforts. By 2010, even with eBooks downloads relatively flat, all my titles except Cheating, Death and the Untrue Tales series were doing better as eBooks. Those few titles’ popularity as audiobooks meant that my total audiobook downloads for 2010 were nearly double those of my eBook downloads, despite every other title going the other way!

One conclusion to draw from this is that the exceptions more closely represent the genres the audience at Podiobooks.com is interested in, and that my other titles didn’t do as well because they weren’t the right books for the audience. On the other hand, by mid-2011 my Untrue Tales books were being downloaded twice as often as eBooks, and in Q4 five times as often, plus in Q4 of 2011 even Cheating, Death had four times as many eBook downloads as audiobook downloads. Some of that has to do with my eBooks being linked to by big “free eBook” sites, but a lot of it has to do with more and more readers being turned on to eBooks, generally.

I can’t say whether the audience for serialized audiobooks is growing or shrinking, but based on my numbers, I can say that my appeal to that audience is shrinking or already tapped out. It’s possible that there’s a core audience of several thousand Podiobooks subscribers and it took me a couple of years to reach them, but that now all the core members have been exposed to my stuff it’s only the new members subscribing… and that the gradual decline relates to some expression of that. Yet even when, after a period without updates, I returned to updating regularly, adding new books every few months and at least one new episode every week, the peak my numbers hit was only about half what it had been about a year earlier, with 50% fewer titles to contribute to the total downloads. The average number of downloads my Podiobooks have been receiving, per title, has been pretty consistently dropping off for two full years, and are now less than 1/6th what they were in January 2010.

I don’t think this is just because they aren’t fresh, new titles – they’re the same titles I have available as eBooks, and eBook downloads have been moving pretty steadily upwards for the last year and a half. …and except for 4 inbound links in Q4 of 2011, I haven’t done or seen anything to advertise/promote any of my titles or formats over the others in the last two years. I hate marketing, promotion, et cetera, and I’ve been pretty lazy about it. I almost haven’t even Tweeted in the last two years. I blog a little, update Facebook/Twitter/G+ when I have a new thing, once or twice, then mostly don’t mention it again. So it must be something else. I think it’s just that the audience listening to audiobooks is small and the audience reading eBooks is growing.